Worship in Spirit and Truth
“But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
John 4:23-24
Outside of Sunday mornings, worship is not the first thing that comes to mind when I get out of bed in the morning. I suspect that’s probably true for most of us. Making the morning coffee, getting the kids off to school and running the gauntlet of Houston traffic—these are the types of things that tend to dominate our thinking in the morning.
The writer David Foster Wallace, during a now legendary 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, shared some timeless wisdom about worship that Christians can affirm. He said, “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
Wallace rightly pointed out that we all worship something. The question, of course, is, “What do we worship?” Christians throughout the centuries have had a sound theological answer to the “what” question. We worship the God of the Bible. Easy enough, right? Well, yes and no. We might be able to answer the question correctly, but most of us have trouble putting this truth into practice.
This is why, in John 4, Jesus says that proper worship is to be “in spirit and in truth.” To worship God in spirit means that it is heartfelt. It originates from deep within us. It is authentic. To do this properly, our affections need to be aimed toward God. We need to be fully present and fully aware of His presence. This takes intentionality and focus. It requires us to pause.
Not only is our worship in spirit, but also in truth. When Jesus says that we are to worship “in truth,” He ultimately means that our worship is to be focused on Him. We see this later in John’s Gospel where He says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” We don’t worship an abstract notion of God, but the person of Jesus Christ. This is why so much of our liturgy invokes Jesus’s name.
Modern life can feel very distracting. We all feel the tug of commitments and the pressure to live our best lives. It can be overwhelming at times; Jesus knows this. More than anything else, Jesus desires our worship. He wants our hearts. He wants our attention. So let us lay aside the distractions that vie for our attention and worship the Father, through the Son, by the power of the Spirit.
